This article provides best practices for product options in Magento. Our recommendation is to have not more than 100 options per product, as performance can be affected.
Many product options leads to an increase in data retrieved for each product on all read and write operations resulting in:
- Increase in SQL queries traffic and heavier
JOINoperations affecting database throughput - Increase of Magento indexes size and full-text search index
The increases listed above can cause these potential site impacts:
- Response time will be increased for most storefront scenarios related to products containing a large number of options in attributes.
- Product management operations in Admin will significantly slow down and can lead to timeouts, especially on scenarios related to attributes list and trees retrieval (including promo rules management).
- Product mass actions functionality can be blocked.
Affected products and versions
- Magento Commerce, all supported versions
- Magento Commerce Cloud, all supported versions
Best practices
Reduce the number of product options by:
- Leveraging different variation mechanisms: complex products, custom options as a source of product variations.
- Building specific product templates with targeting attributes and options, avoiding generalized product templates and option containers.
- Managing products info through external Product Management System (PMS).
Related reading
Refer to:
- Magento User Guide Create products > Configurable Product
- Magento User Guide Product Attributes > Best Practices
- Best practice for attribute SET in Magento
- Best practice Magento product attributes
- DevDocs' Inventory mass actions